“This is a group of people who are figuring out how to pay their bills every month. And now they’re going to be faced with a more difficult challenge, and the government isn’t coming in to help them.”

J.D. Long-Garcia is a senior editor at America working out of Phoenix, Az. He covers the south west, where the Catholic Church is growing. During the Covid-19 pandemic, his writing has focused on immigrant workers, an especially vulnerable group to the current economic disruption.

“In some sense today, social distancing is a privilege. It’s for the privileged class. And that’s not this group of people. If they social distance, they aren’t going to have any money.”

J.D. also discusses his journalistic approach to covering communities that are a part of his own life and heritage, and explains how undocumented immigrants bring much more to America than they take away.

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Links from the show: 

Follow J.D. on Twitter

Articles by J.D.:

Immigrant workers face economic uncertainty during Covid-19 shutdown

Stimulus does little to stifle Covid-19 fears in the undocumented community

U.S.-Mexico border humanitarians scramble to curb coronavirus

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